Who heats and cools? Access to residential heating and cooling in Northern California and implications for energy transitions

Understanding residential heating and cooling access - two services necessary for home habitability and health - is a critical but underexplored dimension of equitable climate mitigation efforts. In this paper focusing on Northern California, we ask how residential heating and cooling (space conditioning) usage is distributed socioeconomically and in relation to projected heating and cooling degree days. This work contributes methodologically by extending existing methods of detecting household space conditioning usage. Additionally, this paper finds that access to the services that heat pumps are meant to deliver – residential heating and cooling – are, themselves, uneven: income, tenure, and linguistic isolation, among other factors, can explain whether households consistently heat or cool, and that heating and cooling use demonstrate similar socioeconomic patterns. We suggest that equitable electrification efforts should encompass more than adoption of individual technologies like heat pumps: it is also necessary to examine the extent to which the services that adoption programs are meant to provide – space heating and cooling – are, themselves, inequitably accessed.